Enjoy Being Human

Genevieve DeGuzman

World Without End

Long after the klaxons had faded
it was a world of wild beasts
with rusty nail eyes. We'd all get
tetanus in the end
, we said
while worry writ large in the
galaxies inscribed in pupil and iris.
There were the bellows, too,
and choked cries. Gobstopper big
for little mouths. It's odd how
the cries of children can mean either joy
or terror. We roamed the ruins, took inventory.
Treasures swelled in our soft-cheeked pockets.
Bigger pieces were left out
for the elements to take. Take note:
What could be more vivid than
wet veils rendered in stone, a hand
dipped in pools of marble thigh? Impossible
except for someone called Bernini,
who should really see what the kids can do
with melted plastic film on leftovers.
Once we slipcased those histories,
noted bruises on the stone as if
it were our own missing childhood quarry,
I felt a sump of stillness in the gaze
of such impotent things. Not in the pylon
or rebar skeletons. Not in the
load-bearing walls still holding up fragile sky.
But in this. I don't know. But I do know
this is why there is still talk of
tomorrow and next week. Why the animals
rise early and shed their names
like last year’s antlers. Why this world
screams like the child.

These Stone Hearts

take millions of years to form. A calcite fistula








built around an object





as ordinary as a leaf, a conch, some




small creature’s mandible




husked and clasped in geological time.
An inheritance grain by grain, the sediment binds



liminal halves of each into orbs
carved by sighs and tears and tectonic burials.



It fed into something more, though,
as tributaries and dark mineral veins tend to do



clinging to minds like chainmail
cinched helmet to boot.



They who marked these stones
sacred boulders and lodestars,
dubbed them moon rocks or dragon eggs



gift baskets granted by gods, or perhaps thought they were fruit pits
tossed merrily from windows
by alien ramblers burning the cosmic rubber on the interstate.



Such mysteries were mimicked with turtle shell
and shark teeth, turned into pretty things on strings,
beads rubbed between fingers with such deviled devotion
they became smoother than polished gneiss.

Such an ungainly way to classify and anoint
because no life in these stones, it turns out,
no sentience or animal frailty we wanted
to muddy the waters,
just a bone shard at the core,
a spot of tragedy no different than any other.

For crows who remember the cruel faces no different
than parched trees dropping seeds to the ground
dreaming of boreal hills for their kin no different
than electric sheep sired for those namers of rocks—
all things end.
But these Devils Marbles, these Klerksdorp Spheres,
precious boulders and sacred mountains
will keep sliding over the backs
of all of us condemned
kings whose name these grains of sand
will not even remember.


About Genevieve DeGuzman

Contributor headshot, Genevieve DeGuzman;

Genevieve DeGuzman writes poetry and fiction. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Five:2:One, Folio, Gravel, Hobart, Reed Magazine, Rogue Agent, The Puritan, Strange Horizons, Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Prize from Split This Rock, and a finalist for the 2017 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. She lives in Portland, OR and can be found on the web at about.me/genevievedeguzman and on twitter @gen_deg.

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